The inner contents of my head. Here be dragons.

Life update: All sorts of news.

Since my last few posts, life got incredibly busy. I had to stop posting and start using all my spare time to keep up.

So, pain wise- still in pain. We went to the stupid bowel clinic appointment and were told two things:

This isn’t bowel related. The distended bowel was probably caused by starvation before the op, as it’s the most common cause of distended bowel without illness. If it had been a partial or complete blockage, I’d be feverish, vomiting and incredibly sick. He also said there was no way he would put me through all these horrible tests just to prove it wasn’t my bowel as I have virtually no bowel symptoms- everything is fine.

He said that the hospital had maybe missed something and I needed a second gynaecological opinion, as this is clearly gynae related. I felt so vindicated (So did I, I went to the appointment for 26 and nearly fucking airpunched right in front of the guy when he said that! 19). He said that his hospital would be better for gynae and that they would take more time over diagnosing and assessing us.

So basically we left that appointment and decided that we weren’t going back to the doctor’s again because frankly, we had had enough. No more bullshit referrals that take six months to go through, no more cranky consultants who insist that we are perfectly healthy and nothing is wrong. No way. We had an alternative plan.

Co-inciding with our visit to the doctor was another challenge- the dance school show. We hurt every day and spent most evenings sitting flat out on the couch or pulling ourselves up to bed. We have crawled up the stairs more times than we can count. We have had several horrendous periods and cried from the pain, but somehow managed to choreograph everything for the show, get it done on time and perform (craply, but still actually be on stage to dance) for three nights on a trot. After that we literally did as little as possible in classes. There was no way making it through adult ballet on Tuesday night was being prefaced by teaching flat out. We struggled through to the end of term and managed, somehow, to make it.

Another thing that has happened which we are still in happy shock over is the fact that our fiance, the Dutchman, signed the mortgage papers and bought the house. It’s been the wildest of rides! We all never dreamed that we would EVER own a house, ever, but this has been a dream of ours for as long as we can remember. Owning a house would have been a pipe dream with the tiny pittance we have been able to earn as a dancer and as a teacher, but the Dutchman has had solid, stable jobs for years and has been able to save. We now are the proud owners of the house his auntie and uncle owned, a house that the Dutchman’s father grew up in, and a house that had been in quite the state of disrepair. His parents have been an immense help. They have been working at the house day and night to fix it, the Dutchman has been working on it every spare moment he’s got, and then so have we… what, did we not mention the key fact here?! 😉

We have officially moved countries. We live in the Netherlands now!

The country we liked so much when we visited at eighteen is now our home. This is, bear in mind, the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage, a country with progressive attitudes and friendly residents. A country whose environment and scenery brings us peace and happiness, and the language- lord, what a challenge, but so worth it! The younger ones (14, 15, 16 in particular) are frigging ACING it. I’m so thrilled when I hear them start to speak Dutch and the Dutchman’s friends get what they’re saying! Not only this, but it looks like health care wise, they outrank the UK by miles. The Dutchman says that quite often, people come from other countries to the Netherlands and the doctors here are shocked that things have been missed- sometimes small things, but other times things that should have been obvious. Problem is, when you have a healthcare system that has been systematically drained of money and its problems blamed on patients, things will be missed as there’s no time to look properly. We are ready to go back and try and get ourselves fixed properly. The Dutchman has promised to help as much as he can.

Alongside this is another huge milestone: we have finally finished seeing Dr K. Gods do we all miss her. So so much. I think she’s not aware of how much importance we have all placed on some of her teachings, but we do know that she is aware that she’s saved our life a couple of times since we started to see her. Nineteen became really upset that we had to leave, as she feels like she’s been horrible to her (when she was a voice) for longer than she’s been nice to her, but Dr K has reassured us all that she thinks we are brave, strong and good. She’s really pleased with our recovery, so much so that we now don’t really come under the DID category officially- well, more so the final D for disorder. We are a dissociative identity, but we function as a team. We are solid as a rock that way. As an example, we recently had a family member de-friend us on social media because apparently, they didn’t like what we posted, calling it “generalisations” and “opinions”. We went into meltdown for a day- but, actually, are now doing really well. We even managed to bounce back the next day fairly well, functioning enough to work on the revision and documentation for our massage course.

That’s another thing that’s happening- we are THIS CLOSE to beasting the final exam from our massage course. We are so excited! We have less than a week now, but we will be fine, we suspect- we feel quite ready. We have spent a lot of time updating client records and sorting out requisite information, revising anatomy and physiology, health and safety, and a ton of other stuff. It’s been a challenge and we have spent a lot of time in bed due to also trying to fix the house, but we are slowly getting there.

It’s been a challenging journey, this past couple of months. There have been a lot of incidences where we have wanted to throw the towel in, but there have been other wonderful things that have made up for it. Watching my sister find a new boyfriend who absolutely treasures her has been so beautiful- they give off the same vibes that the Dutchman and I did when we first got together, it’s the best!- and seeing her so happy; having the Dutchman stay over for his two week holiday, going reverse trick-or treating (we might explain how that works in another post!); having hilarious moments with my sis, the Dutchman and my sister’s new boyfriend… it’s been lovely. Add to that the fact that my sis and the Dutchman are so good as brother and sister, it’s melted all of our hearts! She burst into tears on Christmas morning when she gave us new wall art that she’d made, so we could hang it in our new home, and we cuddled her until she felt better. It was a bit of a bittersweet Christmas as we left on Boxing Day (Tweede Kerstdag for you langophiles!) but she loved having us around and all of us got on really well- her new boyfriend is Latvian, and brought a ton of lovely, delicious Latvian goodies over for Christmas! We had a lot of fun times all together, playing Speak Out (which had everyone in hysterics), eating the lovely Latvian food that sister’s boyfriend (let’s call him V) had made and brought. The family had a lot of innocent fun this Christmas, and lots of lovely presents were bought for the Dutchman and I for our house: we were bought curtains, had a clock made for us, wall art made for us, a cool Harry Potter themed doormat and amazing new kitchen knives! We have been so lucky and so grateful.

We are all learning, too, to work as a whole more often. We seem to be able to split still, and we are all able to come out and be called out by the Dutchman, but quite often we work as a whole. We are more likely to split if someone throws a trigger at us, but sometimes we come out individually just to say hello to someone we love- the Dutchman knows each of us by our quirks and the voices we have. The lovely thing about being with him every evening and every morning is that when something hard happens, he’s there helping us at every turn. We had a bad trauma anniversary recently, and nineteen was particularly unhappy as it happened to her, and he cuddled her til she felt much better. He never stops being amazing. We have played Mario Kart with him, laughed at stupid Youtube videos together, worked in the attic squished close and have been to watch New Year fireworks with him and his awesome crazy friends. This new life we have here has been so amazing so far, even though we have not been here so long and we are still in a lot of pain. The best thing about being here is that we know, at the end of the day, he comes home to us and we all get to wrap him close, feel his beard against our cheek, and kiss him.